Until You're Resting Here With Me
by Destiny Lockheart
Summary: The heat obscures the boundaries they've set up between them. KuroFai
1. Until You're Resting Here With Me

Author's Notes: Don't own them, never will. On that note, happy birthday Okhawa-sensei-sama!

A bit different from what I have been writing in this fandom. Instead of fluff or crack, we have angsty awkward sex.

Enjoy!

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He hated this desert planet and its oppressive heat that tightened his muscles and made him remain inactive indoors for the few hours the suns were fiercest. As if he enjoyed lying sprawled out shirtless covered in sweat on his bed. And if the heat was not torturous enough, the crazy wizard just had to be in the room with him, sprawled casually on the other side of the bed with his traditional grin he wore when inventing new ways to annoy him. If he tried anything, Kurogane might just kill him. But the idiot would probably not be slowed by the heat, and then would laugh at "Kuro-tan" for being "sooo slooowww." He scowled hearing the annoying giggle drawn out in his heat-muddled brain. 

Obviously the damn mage did not see the problem with two sources of body heat existing in the same room. Kurogane had several problems with it, not the least of which dealt with exactly who was providing the second source of heat. "Kuro-tan sure has a lot of scars." He growled when he felt the mage reach out and trace a scar on his shoulder. "Where did you get this one, Kuro-myu?"

"I don't remember." He closed his eyes and tried to block out the other man's presence which became much easier when he retracted his hand. He sighed and tried to think cooling thoughts: cold lakes, ice cream, snow covered mountains, the shiver that shot down his spine when light fingers danced along the palm of his hand…

The hell? His eyes snapped open, and he glared at the blonde lying next to him.

"What about this one?"

"None of your damn business!" He snatched his hand away and tried to ignore the sensations the man's feather-light teach had sent coursing through his body.

The mage, however, would not be deterred in whatever pursuit he had settled on that particular hour, and Kurogane had to grit his teeth when he traced the line of a scar on his side. The bastard was one flitting touch away from getting those fingers chopped off. "Well, then what about this one?" he asked, tracing the scar one way then retracing back to where he started, all the while wearing his usual goofy grin. Did the man stay up at night thinking up more ways he could purposively annoy him or something? Was that the reason he never slept?

"I'll answer you if you answer me one question," he responded, rolling onto his side to face the blonde and with the added bonus of effectively getting his fingers off of him. Fai simply smiled back at him all innocence and kittens. He placed his broad hand on the other man's thin, pale chest. "Where did you get this scar?"

Fai's smile faltered for an instant, but he quickly found the energy to put it back up. "Silly, Kuro-chan, I don't have a scar there."

"Bullshit." Removing his hand, he rolled over to his back. Damn the oppressive heat. It seemed to have gotten worse since the idiot had opened his mouth. If only he could use some type of ice or snow magic to cool the place down a bit. Damn, the heat was irritating, more so than the mage and white manjuu combined on some days. He could feel a bead of sweat slowly trickle down his neck. The air was still, stifling, and dry, only moving when the mage shifted his position. If only he would leave Kurogane to suffer the heat in peace. Maybe then his eyebrow wouldn't be twitching quite so constantly. Just the man's presence seemed to make the air twice as heavy. "Oi."

"Hm?" He felt the sheets rustle beneath him.

"Can't you do something about this heat?"

He remained silent, and Kurogane admitted to the possibility that maybe the skinny guy was suffering from the heat as much as he was. He stared at the ceiling. Something black crawled across it and than became two. He blinked and the ceiling swayed above him. Shit, and now he was hallucinating. No wonder the townspeople had suggested they rest indoors during the middle of the day. How could people live with this sort of heat every day of their lives? Closing his eyes seemed better.

He heard the sheets rustle beside him and wondered what the damn mage was up to now, hoping it would possibly be retreating to his own room. A cold shower would be nice, but unfortunately water was a precious commodity on this planet. He remembered seeing a fuzzy towel at the foot of his bed and surmised he could use that to wipe away some of the sweat. If only he could find the energy to sit up and grab it…

A hand glided across his sweat-slicked stomach in a place he knew he didn't have any scars, just above the waist of his pants. His eyes drifted slowly open, but he did not look at the pale blonde. "What do you think you're doing?"

Fai gave a short little laugh which sounded more sad than amused. "Kuro-sama said he wanted me to do something about the heat." This hadn't been exactly what he had in mind, yet he watched silently as the pale hand slid up his chest and came to rest on the back of his neck. "And since we're both already sweaty…"

That didn't seem like sound logic, but his fuddled brain could not formulate a proper argument. He didn't even try. Instead, "What makes you think I would want to do this with you?" he asked, finally looking at the man as long, deft fingers began massaging the back of his neck.

"Because I'm the only option you have right now." The mage seemed to think that settled the argument because he leaned down and began to nibble on Kurogane's neck. The one hand curled itself around the warrior's arm; the one that had been on his neck traveled slowly back down his body. Damn his flesh for responding more to Fai's actions than to the ninja's reason. If he even had the capacity for reason anymore. Maybe that was the first part of the brain to be melted by the sun, and the resulting goop smothered common sense.

Giving into the heat, or fate, or his body, or his only available option as Fai had so eloquently put it, Kurogane rolled over and pinned the lithe wizard beneath him, kissing and sucking on his neck. The heat had been good for something because more clothes would have slowed the entire process down considerably. The heat in its own had slowed things down enough, making his muscles stiff and too quick movements almost unbearable. Fai surely felt the same languor, or maybe he had been aiming for slow all along and had just been waiting for the opportune moment. It was hard to tell what went on behind those falsely cheery eyes: if he had planned this outcome from the very beginning or if the heat had warped his brain as much as it had Kurogane's.

As it was, both pants were soon crumpled in a heap at the foot of the bed, and Kurogane was wrapped within the mage's long limbs, their sweat-slicked bodies gliding smoothly against each other. The blonde's hands were thankfully never idle, caressing every inch of his heated skin, but they moved so slowly. It seemed to take ages for his hand to wander from his shoulder to his wrists and back up to his shoulders. Then again, he was moving slowly himself. He couldn't seem to gather the strength or energy to fuck the mage as he would have preferred: hard and quick so he could get his brain back to normal as soon as possible. But with the heat enveloping him, he couldn't produce the speed required to achieve that result.

The room was filled only with their panting and the dry stagnant air. He felt a growl forming low in his throat, but the heat swallowed that as well. All he could do was temporarily pant a little more erratically. The heat seemed to have taken away the other man's voice as well. Kurogane had pegged the mage as the type to be noisy during sex, figuring he would be whimpering and moaning which would have quickly gotten annoying, especially in Kurogane's current mood. Even more so if he would have been doing it loudly enough to wake the kids and make them ask awkward questions later. All the mage could do, though, was pant, occasionally gasping something in his ear that sounded vaguely like words Kurogane did not want to hear. The heat combined with Kurogane's slow movements inside him seemed to have rendered the mage speechless. After one particular instance of attempted words, the wizard bit his ear. Kurogane was extremely grateful at the moment that the heat had obscured whatever the blonde had tried to say. Luckily for him, Fai didn't keep his mouth in one place for long either and soon moved away from his ear.

His kisses to the ninja's lips were strangely hesitant, as if he was unsure if he was going to be accepted or pushed coldly away. When Kurogane made no response, Fai kissed him with greater fervor, as if there was nothing else in the world he would rather be doing than kissing Kurogane as the other man ravished his body. As unnerving those thoughts were, Fai's kisses on his neck and shoulders were more disturbing. There was something almost desperate in the man's movements then.

He shifted his position, earning a small whimper and the mage's lips left his neck. Maybe the heat was finally starting to lift, or maybe friction was finally starting to do its thing for both of them. Whatever the reason, the mage had stopped his previous explorations and now seemed satisfied with simply clinging to Kurogane's neck and pulling him closer, panting heavily his ear. Kurogane buried his face in the other man's hair, noticing his own panting was becoming more variable.

The mage's suggestion did have a slightly therapeutic effect, even if Kurogane would never admit it aloud, as his release also loosened the tension the heat had slipped into the rest of his muscles. He allowed himself to collapse on the lithe body beneath him, struggling to catch his breath in the oxygen-deprived air, feeling the man beneath him struggling to do the same. His added weight was probably making that process much more difficult, but he had never professed to attempting to make the blonde's life easier.

A shaky voice in his ear said, "Only you can make it a scar, Kurogane," followed by a bitter laugh as if he knew the ninja would never consent to such a request. The mage was clinging to him too tightly; he had to literally wrench himself away from the other's grasp. He put his pants back on and cleaned himself off before throwing the towel at the blonde. He laid down on his side, facing away from his companion, aiming to sleep for the rest of the suns' cruelty. In a few minutes, he heard the mage do the same, though he did not retreat back to his own room as Kurogane had expected he would. But he was far too exhausted to worry about that or the extreme temperature at the moment.

Later, they would both pretend it had all been a hallucination brought about by the heat.

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	2. I Cannot Be

Kurogane decided as much as he hated oppressive heat, he hated the cold just as much. It froze his muscles so much he could not stop moving for very long or else they would freeze and it would take hours for them to warm back up to full capacity. During the day it forced him and the kids to wear as many layers of clothes as the damn mage. Even the white manjuu was sporting a new fluffy blue coat, yet it still remained hidden under Kurogane's clothes most of the day.

The locals had told them the temperature had not reached above freezing in five years. They had a legend about a noble mage whose heart had frozen at the loss of his sister. He had vowed to make his land suffer as he had. He made the temperature drop so that the inhabitants would freeze as he had. Kurogane liked to watch people when stories were being exchanged. The man who told it to them seemed as if he really believed the story, and his eyes kept darting around as if he was afraid someone was going to punish him for telling the story to strangers. Sakura looked as if she pitted the poor soul who had lost his sister. Syaoran got his usual look of grim determination whenever he suspected a feather was involved and it would take a good deal of effort to regain it. As for the mage, Kurogane was sure he had never seen his face so pale or his eyes so hollow.

After a fruitless day of searching for the feather on the cold, snowy mountainside which involved a lot of shivering and stamping of feet, Fai defying all laws of physics by walking on top of the snow, and a near death experience when Kurogane had to push Fai out of the way of a giant, falling icicle, they returned frozen, covered in snow, and sore to the house that had offered them shelter. Sakura and Mokona would be spending the night with the host's youngest daughter, and Syaoran would be staying with their eldest son. Kurogane and Fai would be sharing a room with a single bed to share body heat. His mind tried to grasp at something when it heard the words "body heat," memories of another heated world where body heat with the mage was the last thing he had wanted, but the thought remained elusive, slipping through his mind like sugar through his fingers. Fai gave him a strange sort of smile as Kurogane stiffly followed him into the room.

The blonde sat down by the ample fire, watching it crackle and burn, the red flames reflecting eerily in his eyes. Kurogane decided he didn't like the way it cast shadows across the man's otherwise flawless face. He set about changing out of his wet clothes and into the pajamas the hostess had left out for them on the bed. He had wanted to get changed quickly because Fai always made him feel uncomfortable if he was doing nothing while Kurogane was trying to get changed. Unfortunately, his muscles failed to cooperate, still stiff from the cold that seemed to settle in his bones, turning his marrow to ice. Despite the fire, the cold air nipped at his skin when he pulled the last shirt over his head, causing him to involuntarily gasp and shiver. He had never been to a country before where it got this cold after the sun was down. The little heat that came during the day was not trapped by anything and afraid of the dark, running away with the sun that had given it life. His noise must have caught the blonde's attention because he was staring at him in that lazy way that made him wonder what was going on back there if anything. "Something wrong, Kuro-rin?" There was no cheerfulness, no teasing, in the way he asked the question, and, even though the blue eyes were fixated on him, Kurogane felt as if the man was not looking at him. Another shiver ran down his spine that had nothing to do with the cold. He sneezed; the blonde seemed to come back to himself at the sound, and he fixed a slightly worried gaze on the ninja. "Kuro-chan, you should be taking better care of yourself." Kurogane hastened to put a new shirt on before the mage decided to make some comment on his state of half-undress.

Once he was fully changed into dry clothes, he crawled underneath the several furry blankets. He felt a little bit better, but his mind remembered vague glimpses of shared body heat, and for reasons he couldn't explain, he suddenly wanted the mage in the bed next to him. "Don't stay up too late," he instructed as he buried his face in the pillow away from the cold. He never heard if the blonde made a reply or not.

A couple of hours later, he woke up feeling cold still, and it didn't take him long to realize the mage had yet to join him in the bed. He viewed Fai's current behavior as erratic, well erratic for Fai since the man usually made the most, or at least tried to, of every opportunity he got to spend in bed with Kurogane, tormenting him until he fell asleep. Feeling slightly concerned, he propped himself up on his elbows and peered about the now dim room. It was snowing outside, large fluffy flakes staining the otherwise flawless dark of the night.

The mage was sitting in the window, changed into the nightclothes of this world, face turned away from Kurogane, one hand pressed against the glass. Of all the strange things Kurogane had seen Fai done, the way the blonde was currently watching the snow with that blank look in his eyes was the most unsettling. A hidden part of his mind tried to yell something at him about scars and healing and a hot, sweaty day, but the rest of his brain argued it was all a hallucination.

He pushed the blankets off and shivered at how much colder the night had become. He wondered how Fai could possibly still be comfortable, but he seemed to recall the man insinuating he came from a very cold country a few worlds back. He slipped out of the bed, promising himself he would be back quickly with another source of heat in tow. He slid soundlessly across the hardwood floor and stood behind him, finding it a bit odd that the man had yet to notice his presence. He looked over his head for a moment, trying to find what was so entrancing out there in the white bleakness. Visibility was low; he could see a lone, dead tree wrapped in glistening ice, endless amounts of snow on the ground and falling from the black sky, and their faint reflections in the glass.

"Hey," he said, placing his hand on the blonde's shoulder. He doubled over as he got elbowed rather roughly in the stomach for this trouble.

"Oh, it's only you, Kuro-sama." The man had plastered a big, goofy grin on his face which only infuriated Kurogane further since he knew it had not been there a moment before. "You really shouldn't sneak up on people like that," he chided. The man didn't even have the common decency to apologize for knocking the wind out of him.

Kurogane straightened himself, convinced he was breaking through tiny ice crystals in the air. The room still seemed frozen even with another source of heat less than a foot away from him. "What are you still doing up?" he asked, glad to see at least the man was no longer grinning like an idiot.

Fai took his hand and started running his fingers lightly along the scar on his palm. "You never told me where you got this scar." Strange how something like that should have ignited the air between them did nothing; any heat the man was causing killed by the cold before it ever reached either of them. He watched with some morbid fascination as the man pulled his hand and splayed it against his scrawny chest. "And you still haven't turned my wounds into scars." He had vague recollections of a similar situation involving far less clothes.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he growled, snatching his hand away from the man's chest. It was too cold for the man's mind games, and he most certainly did not want to see the pout that crossed the man's face. Everything his mind was trying to remember was just a bad hallucination brought about by the trying heat of that day.

"I thought it was a hallucination as well." The last thing he needed was the man to be reading his mind. "But it couldn't have been a hallucination if we're both remembering it." He still couldn't find any heat, even when the man stood up and took a step closer.

"I told you, I don't know what you're talking about," feeling a bit uncomfortable with the man so close, the mist from their breath mingling in the air between him. "Can't you do something about this cold?"

Fai gave him one of those sad smiles, and Kurogane turned to crawl back into the bed. He closed his eyes and felt the man crawl into the bed next to him. A cold hand slid under his shirt and glided across his stomach. His eyes drifted slowly open. "What do you think you're doing?"

Fai gave one of his short, little laughs that always sounded more sad than amused to Kurogane's ears. "Kuro-chan said he wanted me to do something about the cold." Sharing body heat was one way to combat subzero temperatures, but this wasn't what he had in mind.

His frozen brain could not, however, formulate any arguments as to why Fai should no be so close to him. He did not even try. Instead, "Your hands are cold," he said, looking at the man as long, deft fingers massaged his chest.

"Then we'll just have to warm each other up." The mage seemed to think that settled whatever argument Kurogane had the vague suspicion they were having, because he leaned over and began to nibble on Kurogane's neck. The hand that had been exploring his chest traveled slowly back down his body and into his pants. Kurogane gasped and arched his back when the cold hand came in contact with his arousal because when his hands were that cold, Kurogane didn't see how anybody could view it as something other than torture.

Giving into the urge for body heat, or fate, or his body, or just to get the man's cold hand out of his pants, Kurogane rolled over and pinned the blonde beneath him, ravishing his neck with his teeth and tongue. Somehow he got the impression that the current scene had played itself out exactly the same way before, but he passed it off as a delusion of his body desperately trying to remember heat.

Feeling the clothes were very much getting in the way, despite the fact he was still cold, he started tugging upwards on Fai's shirt. The waif stopped him, hands grabbing onto his wrists. "It's too cold for that," he panted. Kurogane confusedly obliged when the man pushed him slightly away, and he sat back to watch. "Like this," Fai said, rolling over so he was on all fours, rear raised in the air just so.

"No," Kurogane growled, and for a brief moment he registered surprise on Fai's face. Besides, the other way seemed much warmer for him.

The blonde reached behind him and pulled his pants down just enough to fully expose his ass, and it took all of Kurogane's will power not to just take what was so willingly offered to him. "It's okay," he barely heard the man whisper, "I'm used to it this way."

"No," he growled with a bit more force this time, punctuating it by rolling the man onto his back. "I prefer it this way," he told him, pulling off the blonde's pants before settling himself between the pale thighs.

"Kuro-myu, I…" he gasped as Kurogane's fingers stretched him, "don't think this is such a good idea."

"Then keep your legs under the blankets." Kurogane entered him swiftly and without warning, causing the blonde to gasp and wrap his long limbs around Kurogane, pulling him closer and clinging to him in a tight embrace. Though the man's hands scrambling at the back of his neck were still cold, causing him to shiver, the man's body was warm, and he buried his face into the crook of the blonde's neck. His skin was still warm there, and for a while all he wanted to do was they there and breath in the musky scent of the man's skin.

"You would be warmer if you moved," he heard the blonde whisper in his ear, and he felt him shifting his thighs higher around his waist.

He granted the man's request and soon learned he was correct in pegging the man as a noise-maker. He whimpered, moaned, gasped, and panted, whispering things in Kurogane's ear as he clung tightly to his shoulders. He shifted his position and thrust harder, hoping to rid the man of coherent speech and thought. All the sounds they made were crystallized in the cold air, so he could hear everything perfectly. There were some things Kurogane decided he definitely never had wanted to hear. After one particular instance, Kurogane bit down on the man's ear in an effort to shut him up. Thankfully, Fai also found other things to occupy his mouth. At one point he had brought Kurogane's free hand to his mouth and pulled the ninja's cold fingers into the warm depths.

Fai's kisses to his neck and jaw were familiarly desperate. Unnerving as those thoughts were, Fai's firm kisses to his mouth were even more disturbing. He kissed him without any hesitancy as if he knew he would not be pushed away. However, some of the desperation began to slide into the man's movements even then.

The blonde tightened his grip on Kurogane as he came, mewling some bastardization of his name, pulling him deeper into his warmth. Kurogane soon followed, burying his face in the man's soft hair. Eventually he pushed himself out of the man's warmth, instantly regretting it. The night air felt ten times colder on his sweaty skin. As soon as he moved, Fai grabbed for his pants. "It doesn't mean anything," he said once the man was again fully dressed and safely snuggled under the blankets. Settling himself down on his side facing the window, he tried to pretend he imagined the hurt look that crossed the man's face. "It was just body heat."

"I know." After a few moments, he felt something warm hesitantly press against his back. He stayed perfectly still, and the blonde seemed to take that as compliance, snuggling more firmly up against him. "And the other time is still just a hallucination."


End file.
